Ethereum Co-Inventor's New Cardano Blockchain CryptoCurrency ADA Starts Trading on Bittrex, Up 30%

Charles Hoskinson, a former Ethereum CEO, and co-founder has launched Cardano Blockchain alongside 30 team members from IOHK. Cardano is a smart contracts platform pegged to a native cryptocurrency, ADA. The token was listed on US cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex yesterday and is up 30% since listing. ADA's token sale ran from September 2015 to January 2017 but was strictly limited to Asian investors. Bittrex's listing is aimed at giving Western investors a chance to participate.

Cardano comes at a time when almost everyone in the industry is attempting to build an ideal smart contract platform. Most recently, NEO, Tezos, Qtum and EOS have launched targeting similar use cases. Up until the announcement, work on Cardano was mostly behind closed doors. IOHK spent time building the protocol from scratch using Haskell, a functional programming language.

The blockchain uses a proof of stake consensus algorithm. Emurgo, an Asian based company supporting the project, is hoping for the widest possible distribution of the 31 billion ADA vouchers, out of a total supply of 45 billion. So far, only Bittrex has listed the ADA/BTC trading pair with $76 million in volumes in the past 24 hours on coinmarketcap. The token is trading at 0.00000581 BTC and a total market cap of $620,000,000.

Payments Journal quoted Bill Shihara, CEO and Co-Founder of Bittrex:

"We're excited to launch the Cardano platform on our exchange. The Ouroboros Praos protocol that was developed as the basis for Cardano uses a provably secure method for the proof-of-stake protocol."

Charles is still part of the Ethereum Classic project, a fork of Ethereum which he helped found in 2014. He left before the project launched and paired up with Jeremy wood to form IOHK. Emurgo, a Japanese consortium, hired IOHK on a five-year contract to build the Cardano. Emurgo has set ambitions to emulate the role of ConsenSys to the Ethereum blockchain. It will design decentralized applications and smart contracts for Cardano.

Charles said to Payments Journal:

"IOHK is proud to have provided the vision and technology for Cardano. It incorporates our groundbreaking proof-of-stake algorithm, Ouroboros, and the technology is highly innovative in the area of blockchain."

The project is still in bootstrap mode awaiting further distribution of its tokens. With the addition of new capabilities, developers will be able to write dapps using familiar languages such as Java, C, and JavaScript.

Cardano blockchain is tackling the problems that have bedeviled existing public blockchain models. IOHK revealed plans for on chain governance and a treasury system to support future development and protocol changes.

Perhaps this launch will put to rest accusations of ADA as a Japanese scam coin